Brandon Getty

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Today’s QA world is fueled by two key forces: the growing expectations of product companies and the competition between the testing providers. Every day, CTOs and dev managers are pushing their teams to break new ground, and they’re looking for QA resources that can match their enthusiasm and passion for innovation. Most product companies are looking for a testing services provider that feels right at home on the cutting edge. With the urgency to innovate being one of the driving forces in the industry, the QA world can expect major things in 2018 and beyond.

The Agile method is a development methodology that depends on fast iteration and close collaboration among dev and QA teams. Historically, people have viewed outsourced QA as incompatible with Agile, emphasizing the misconception that teams need to be under the same roof in order to effectively communicate and reach alignment on project requirements. This view is drawn straight from the Agile manifesto: “The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is a face-to-face conversation.”

But with advances in technology come great shifts in thinking, and people are realizing that dev and QA need not be housed in the same building — much less the same country or continent.

Product companies have it hard these days. From established organizations to scrappy startups, everyone’s focused on trimming the fat and running lean. This puts the onus on Dev and QA managers to deliver innovative, high-quality products using a constricted budget and limited resources. In turn, today’s recruiting process is about getting a lot of bang for a little buck.

You know the old saying: “The customer is always right.” Turns out that it’s true across industries — from service and retail, to IT and software QA. Product companies work hard to deliver features that delight their customers, and software QA providers do their best to ensure that the quality of these features is high before shipment. At the end of the day, we all work in service of the customer.

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) have been the stuff of fantasy for a long time. Remember the bulky headsets and long, snaking connector cords of the 1980s? But it’s becoming increasingly popular and approachable in today’s market — just consider the rampant success of Pokémon GO, the mobile AR game. Companies are starting to explore how VR/AR can help create a more attractive, immersive product for their customers. With this exploration comes plenty of innovative development and QA testing work.

From the early robotics of the 1950s to the advanced, algorithm-driven machine learning of today, AI has come a long way in a short amount of time. Though AI is still relatively young, QASource has found that AI's current and potential value to automated testing is massive. With the increasing complexity of applications, the lightning-fast speed of the software development lifecycle, and the highly competitive time to market across industries, engineers will take all the help they can get, whether it be from machines or other humans.

It seems there is a fresh news story about a high-profile hacking or customer data breach every week. No organization wants to be the subject of the next reputation-ruining headline, but many business leaders still skip over the topic of security when it comes to interviewing, hiring, and onboarding a new outsourced QA partner. The focus instead often tends to be on cost and speed, all the while assuming that security is covered.

Building out an effective dev organization requires a strategic, yet flexible approach to budgeting. As your company grows, you may need to quickly ramp up resources, or ramp down certain teams and shift them over to newly prioritized areas of the roadmap.

This volatility can make planning the budget for any team within your organization challenging, but it is especially true for an outsourced team that must rapidly shift and shape to the changing needs of stakeholders, dev and QA managers, and the customer.

We have some bad news: There is almost no way of creating a completely secure software program. Vile ransomware sneaks in through a variety of different cracks in safety infrastructure, infiltrating machines, and eventually, entire organizations through an email link accidentally clicked.

But if you’re in the software industry, you know this already. So exactly what is a fast-growing product company — under the pressure of breakneck release speeds and a demanding market — supposed to do to guard against ransomware?

The phrase ’Internet of Things’, typically abbreviated as IoT, has been bouncing around in the tech industry for years. But there are still plenty of consumers—and even product company leaders—puzzling at its meaning. What is it? How does it impact the plain old “Internet” that I’ve grown to know and love? How does it affect my product, my business, and how my teams run tests?

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Our bloggers are the test management experts at QASource. They are executives, QA managers, team leads, and testing practitioners. Their combined experience exceeds 100 years and they know how to optimize QA efforts in a variety of industries, domains, tools, and technologies.

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